Dangerous liaisons

As most teenage girls in Britain will already know, Twilight - a tale of love between a young woman and a vampire - has now been made into a movie. It will no doubt be a huge hit. But what a shame it's not more like Buffy, writes Lucy Mangan

Twilight premiered last night. If you don't know what that means, the chances are that you are neither a teenage girl nor mother or teacher of same. If you were, you would know instantly that today is the day the first book in Stephanie Meyer's internationally bestselling vampire romance saga comes to the big screen. It tells the story of Isabella (Bella) Swan, a 17-year-old high school student, and Edward Cullen, who appears to be a similarly ordinary student but is in fact a 107-year-old member of the local undead community. They fall immediately, passionately and irrevocably in love but can never truly be together because, although Edward has renounced the drinking of human blood, the hunger remains and if he were ever truly to unleash his urges regarding Bella, he fears he would end up killing her rather than making sweet, sweet love.

The idea for the book came in a dream, says Meyer, a Mormon who performed the impressive feat of typing the subsequent 500-page narrative one-handed with a baby on her lap and two other children under five playing round her feet. Since that dream five years ago, three more books have followed and the tetralogy has sold more than 25m copies around the globe, spawning countless fans, websites and even Twilight tribute bands. The film took $70m (£47m) in its opening weekend in America and the latest hardback instalment of the saga, Breaking Dawn, will - like its predecessors - doubtless dominate the US bestseller lists for weeks.

Looking at the synopsis of Twilight, sceptics and cynics might ask if this was a dream that came to the author after she fell asleep in front of an episode of Joss Whedon's television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which also centred round the relationship between a high school girl and a "good" vampire who couldn't have sex for fear that he would turn evil again. Sceptics and cynics who have actually read Twilight or seen the film, however, will simply roll their eyes at their misguided brethren and say, "If only."

If only Meyer had taken Buffy as her template. If only she had used that groundbreaking series as her foundation and built on it. If only there was a Whedonesque intelligence and modern, feminist sensibility informing Twilight and its successors. If only.

What you have instead in Meyer's work is a depressingly retrograde, deeply anti-feminist, borderline misogynistic novel that drains its heroine of life and vitality as surely as if a vampire had sunk his teeth into her and leaves her a bloodless cipher while the story happens around her. Edward tells her she is "so interesting ... fascinating", but the reader looks in vain for his evidence.

Far more important, however, is the nature of the relationship between Bella and Edward. In interviews, Meyer claims that the theme of the Twilight saga is choice, because Edward chooses not to behave as his nature impels him to. Alas, the only choice Bella gets to make is to sacrifice herself in ever-larger increments. The book opens with her martyrish insistence on going to stay with her estranged father in Forks, Washington so that her flighty mother can go travelling with her new boyfriend. Once there, she swiftly takes over the cooking, cleaning and laundry for her father, and then we follow her through innumerable other acts of servitude and self-abnegation as she becomes more and more obsessed with her beautiful, bloodsucking boyfriend, culminating in the moment when she tells her friends and family that her plans with Edward have been cancelled (shortly before they head off to be alone together for the first time), so that if he does lose control and kill her, he won't be blamed. She's not Buffy, she's Patient Griselda, always spin-drying.

It sounds melodramatic and shrill to say that Bella and Edward's relationship is abusive, but as the story wears on it becomes increasingly hard to avoid the comparison, as she gradually isolates herself from her friends to protect his secret, and learns to subordinate her every impulse and movement to the necessity of not upsetting Edward and his instincts ("I could quite easily kill you, Bella, by accident"), until by halfway through she is trying to suppress her very pulse ("my blood was racing and I wished I could slow it, sensing that this must make everything so much more difficult") and planning her movements like a chess game - "I worried that it would provoke the strange anger that flared whenever I slipped and revealed too clearly how obsessed I was." Whenever she responds physically to his kisses, he immediately draws away and berates her. Supporters will call this the erotics of abstinence. I call it fear and distaste for female sexuality and a poisonous message to be feeding young women.

Edward, of course, has warned her not to be alone with him. He warns her constantly (in between praising her for the quietness with which she absorbs the latest revelation about his true vampiric nature) that she rouses him to such a pitch that he can barely contain himself. To Meyer and her legions of fans, this is evidence of his virtuous, gentlemanly nature. To those less enamoured of Meyerworld, the implication is that Bella chooses to put herself in danger and the further implication is that she must therefore bear full responsibility for the consequences (which, in the way of vampire romances, are not entirely confined to hugs and puppies). When she once confesses that she did find one of his outbursts of temper terrifying, he responds "You need a healthy dose of fear. Nothing could be more beneficial for you." To some, this counts as further proof that he wants to protect Bella from herself. To others, it all smacks uncomfortably of the "asking for it" defence. To the older and/or more savvy reader, Edward is less an ideal boyfriend than a proto-rapist.

In the book (though, naturally, less so in the film, as she is still physically present on screen), despite being the narrator, Bella all but disappears as a character. The few signs of wit and independence she exhibits at the beginning of the book, when she is starting her new school, have long been abandoned in favour of mute devotion to Edward, which by the end is so slavish that she asks him to turn her into a vampire too, so that he needn't be frightened of killing her any more.

Now, teenage readers - or viewers, although the film loses much of the written detail of Bella and Edward's relationship, which in this case could be classed as a good thing - aren't idiots. But they are young, inexperienced and underinformed, and that makes them vulnerable to influences they are exposed to uncritically. And the Twilight phenomenon has not, by and large, been objected to by adults, perhaps because they are aware only of the high concept of the saga and simply assume that, because the young protagonists have to avoid sex, their relationship can only be virtuous.

Edward is no hero. Bella is no Buffy. And Twilight's underlying message - that self-sacrifice makes you a worthy girlfriend, that men mustn't be excited beyond a certain point, that men with problems must be forgiven everything, that female passivity is a state to be encouraged - are no good to anyone. It should be staked through its black, black heart.

• Twilight is on general release on December 19.

· This article was amended on Saturday December 6 2008. Four novels comprise Stephanie Meyer's Twilight Saga, not three as we originally said in the above piece analysing the main female character in this vampire romance. This has been corrected.